The present invention relates generally to data sorting systems and methods, and more particularly, to data sorting accelerators and methods that use linking of data and dynamic allocation of memory to reduce memory and processing requirements.
Parameter sorting may be performed by general purpose processors, or special signal processing elements, which by the nature of their architecture compromise speed for broad functionality and programmability. Parameter sorting performed by parallel processing techniques demands significantly more processing hardware and memory and includes complex vectorization of the sorting process. This alternative is hardware efficient, fast, and still offers programming versatility.
Conventional sorting systems rearrange data to place the data in a desired sorted format. Such sorting conventionally involves allocating memory to accommodate worst case requirements for each sorted category and hence is inefficient in the use of memory resources. Such sorting also conventionally involves iterative searching for or arranging of data in memory and hence is inefficient in the use of processing resources. Such iterative searching includes binary or successive approximation searches.